In what should have been a rather unremarkable episode in American history, Abraham Lincoln took his watch in for repair to the shop of one Jonathan Dillon in 1861. As fate would have it, the watch happened to be in Dillon’s shop when news reached the federal city of South Carolina’s attack on Ft. Sumter. On the back of the watch face, Dillon etched the words still there today: “The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try.” Dillon saw clearly then what has become clear now, that conflict between North and South would bring an end to chattel slavery in this country.
Except that isn’t what happened. This is the version of the story Dillon passed on in an interview in 1906, more then fifty years after the war had ended. It is true that Dillon worked on Lincoln’s watch. It is also true that he etched a note on the inside. The key discrepancy, however, is the content of the note. What Dillon actually wrote was:
“Jonathan Dillon
April 13-1861
Fort Sumpter was attacked
by the rebels on the above
date J Dillon
April 13-1861
Washington
thank God we have a government
Jonth Dillon”
Whether Dillon knowingly embellished the story or creatively misremembered it remains unknown. What is definitely true, though, is that Dillon took part in some classically American historiographical retconning. Few white northerners at the time earnestly desired an abolition war, and far fewer wanted to take steps to realize one. To remember the attack on Ft. Sumter as the harbinger of slavery’s end casts the matter in a light far too inevitable.
But this version of the past is the one Dillon and with him a loud part of the American nation needed to remember. Far better to remember the War Between the States as a fight to free slaves than Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, which all but endorsed the Corwin Amendment that would have explicitly conceded the white South’s view of the Constitution, that the federal government could have no power to interfere with slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation makes for better national storytelling than the public reaction to it in the North, which was not uniformly positive. To think of the Civil War as a struggle to free the oppressed eases the mind in a way that casting it as war of centralization driven by cold, Bismarckian realpolitik does not, though a full and fair reading of the evidence, it should be said, demands neither view. Nations, as Zora Neale Hurston once wrote of women, forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget.
We have decided, quite rightly, that we don’t want to forget that the war ended chattel slavery. We remember the sacrifice of Union soldiers at the great battles, and more recently, the men of the segregated black regiments have received long overdue acknowledgement for their role in that war. We remember Antietam, Gettysburg, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the ratification of the 13th Amendment. We remember Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and the generous conditions Grant accorded his vanquished foes. We remember the reunification of estranged kin, those prodigal sons brought home at the point of the bayonet. And all of these memories we preserve in the interest of keeping ourselves at peace in the present.
The trouble with memories, of course, is that many of them are flat out made up. Many of those sons of the North couldn’t have cared one way or the other about slavery. Congress, never known for its alacrity in reference to anything, moved slowly on the issue. There was no great reunification. Many a white southerner remained embittered about the defeat for more than a generation, and you don’t have to go too far today to find some of their descendants still ill at ease with the matter. The city of Vicksburg, Mississippi did not celebrate the nation’s independence day again until 1945. Former Confederates like John Mosby and James Longstreet,who acceded to the new settlement and joined the Republicans, earned themselves a derogatory nickname: scalawags. For freed former slaves, the fruits of emancipation rapidly turned sour. Klansmen, Redshirts, and their sundry accomplices intimidated southern blacks against participating in public life, rolling back numerous political gains and ushering in the dark days of Jim Crow.
Though Americans like to think of themselves as winners, our Civil War produced at least as many if not more losers. We rightly herald the war as the end of slavery. But if the Union army won the war, then white southern “Redeemers” won the peace, reinstating the racial hierarchy that the Reconstruction Amendments and the Freedmen’s Bureau could not, or would not, kill off. Freedmen snapped off the chains of slavery, but at the cost of enduring the torments of segregation. With respect to radical abolitionists, they won the end of human bondage, but not the social systems that enabled it. Pre-war nationalists, who thought national politics could revolve around anything except for slavery, were losers too, their old Union smashed up and forcibly cobbled back together. Nobody lost more, though, than the widows and orphans. However noble their kin’s sacrifices were, their sacrifice still meant an empty seat at Christmas dinner, a vacant pew at church on Sunday, a fond embrace never again to be felt, a memory preserved in sterile entries in family bibles and faded daguerreotypes on the mantelpiece. When hundreds of thousands die, only a heart of stone can come away not thinking that in some sense, everybody lost.
But even in the midst of all that, would we want to live in a world in which the outcome were different? It would have been better if the war had not had to happen, but if wishes were horses then beggars would ride. Do we want to look at this past, this messy history, and conclude that because it did not end in the way that we wanted, that it left us nothing worth living, dying, and fighting for? Can we with seriousness look at what Lincoln and Grant did and say that this nation and the world would be better had they not done what they did? The answer lies with you. You may answer “yes” if you wish, but I submit that that says more about you than about our national history. No, this nation’s many pasts are not perfect, but we no longer live in them. It is our duty now to claim the legacy of our victories and set forth to seek more. Jonathan Dillon may not have remembered the events of April 1861 all that accurately, but neither have we if, in our postmodern hubris, we have persuaded ourselves that nothing has really changed. One can either wallow in defeat and lament, or choose to forge them into victory.